way, poetry is creative, because it revives the bodies of nature with new but congenial spirits, and completes their intended animation, by repossessing them in the name of the human soul.
This, however, is nearly all that can be said of the appreciation of correspondence by mankind at present. It is, wherever we find it, only an instinctive knowledge, and maintained for the necessity of the case; enough being admitted to carry on the business of the world, or to authorize the jaded mind to take refreshment in the ideal realms of song. For the rest, correspondence has died away out of religion; it has had neither revival nor shelter in the conceptions of philosophy; and science, preoccupied with engagements and distractions, has not yet had leisure to base it, where its lower foundations will lie, upon the rocks and mountains of nature. Let us briefly review the reasons which prevent its admission within the pale of knowledge in any of these spheres.
It may be premised, that the acknowledgment of correspondence as a general law, depends upon the acknowledgment of God as one infinite Being, who has created all things for one infinite end. Whatever impairs the force of this idea, or perplexes its ultimate unity, also essentially disturbs the doctrine of correspondence. If there be not unity in the design of nature, then one thing is not answerable to, or serviceable for, another, which is the same as to say, that there is no universal correspondence. But where, among the religions and sects of the old world, is the theology which is not virtually polytheism? As against the heathen religions, we admit the charge easily enough: their votaries bow down to wood and stone; and the fact is as palpable as the idol. They conceive of God as a finite being, man, animal, or thing; or perhaps they conceive of a multitude of gods; and it is; impossible that creative or universal functions should attach to these, or that the uses of all things, in all worlds, should ascend by steps to such local and partial centres. Who can imagine for a moment that any of the gentile or national deities are the infinite ends of creation? But no finite power, and no number of such powers, could even modify the universe correspondentially, still less create it so.
